Friday, February 26, 2010

Rationally Optimizing Pigeons

Several years ago it was shown that dogs are less prone to the sunk cost fallacy than humans (couldn't find a non-gated version; pop science article here.)

The humiliation continues: pigeons are better than humans at the Monty Hall Dilemma. The question is whether humans lack whatever circuit is allowing pigeons to inductively (one assumes) approximate the logic of the Dilemma, or whether there's something in human cognition interfering with otherwise at-least-equal optimizing ability in this task.

A reasonable way of thinking about the first option is that for this specific behavior, for whatever reason, pigeons are more optimized, though for most things they aren't very good generalists.

Words to Live By

"...there is good and bad speculation, and this is not an unparalleled activity in science...Those scientists who have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun." - Dan Dennett